A prospective employer invited me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my proposed alternative.

no-hackerrank.md

Well, that was unexpected. In the following, I’m trying to follow Jon Evans’ advice from “The Terrible Technical Interview”.

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To: [email protected]
From: Ahmed Fasih
Subject: Re: Programming Test Invitation

Hi there! Thanks for offering to let me take a HackerRank test for ABC, I appreciate the vote of confidence.

I'd never heard of HackerRank, but after you wrote two other employers sent me their own HackerRank tests. Having worked on those tests first (I considered them practice, for the real thing with ABC :), I'd like to check if you have flexibility in finding an alternative way to evaluate my basic coding chops.

This is because, as functional programmer and author Paul Chiusano says, "Programming is all about managing complexity" [1], but HackerRank is quite bad at measuring my ability to manage complexity. It asks for small algorithmic coding puzzles to be done in unnatural conditions including (1) time limits, (2) forbidding research on Wikipedia or StackOverflow, (3) forbidding collaboration, and (4) forbidding the use of libraries (Python and JavaScript e.g. are so different when confined to their vanilla languages without Numpy/Pandas or lodash/npm packages).

I'm hoping ABC's recruitment policy is flexible enough to let me offer alternative, or at least parallel, routes to quantifying my skill in coding—skills in managing complexity, selecting libraries, and extending existing code, not just solving algorithmic puzzles. I have written a number of open-source projects that I'd love to spend two hours adding features and squashing bugs:

• Ebisu is a Python (and JavaScript) library I wrote to implement a Bayesian estimation problem (for scheduling quizzes in spaced-repetition software): I have a detailed writeup on what it does at https://fasiha.github.io/ebisu/ and the source code lives at https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu

• Mudder.js is a JavaScript library I wrote that implements simple arithmetic in arbitrarily-high-base numbering systems to lexicographically-subdivide string space, which is useful in NoSQL databases for use as keys: a detailed writeup is included in the repo at https://github.com/fasiha/mudderjs

• The Texture Shaded Globe lets you interactively visualize the world's elevation and terrain after it's been texture-shaded, which is a fractional-Laplacian frequency-domain operation that I wrote in Python to work on ~100 gigabytes of data: the app is at https://fasiha.github.io/texshade-cesium-viewer/ and a description of it, with links to specific views, is at https://fasiha.github.io/post/texshade/

• KanjiBreak is a webapp I wrote in JavaScript and Elm to collaborate with my friends and family who were also learning Chinese/Japanese characters. We are using it to make a character dependency graph: the app is at https://kanjibreak.glitch.me and includes a detailed "Help" section (it may take a few seconds to load the first time, since Glitch is a free resource that spins down inactive servers).

These are just four projects I picked as I scrolled through my list of recently-committed GitHub projects [2] that I think showcase not just skill in programming but also in math and design.

Would ABC be willing to work with me to define a better way to check my technical qualifications by choosing one of these projects (or any other project of mine!) to perhaps conduct a code review and/or add an enhancement that you would like to see? I think that would be a much more interesting and useful way to spend two hours, rather than implementing cute little algorithms inside an isolated environment like HackerRank.

I'm hoping that, if the HackerRank test turns out to be an absolute requirement for ABC, that we can do something like the above in addition to HackerRank.

Thanks for considering it! I'd love to work for ABC, and I hope I'm not being too forward or presumptuous by sending you this long email.

Best regards,

Ahmed

[1] See http://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html
[2] At https://github.com/fasiha?tab=repositories

People spends countless hour to argue whether good at running proving that you are a good football player? The answer is no, but it is an indicator that's you have good speed and strength and stuff and it does relate somehow. That's why to test a football player, you need to have multiple type of tests: running, passing ... and yes, playing in a game etc.

Similarly, if you try to say a simple screening test should test all of your abilities and should say whether you are a good software engineer? We are all engineers, and we know that it's a hard problem to measure a good engineer, and to solve a hard problem, you need to break the problem down into different components and test it in multiple rounds, that's why we have screening, phone and many onsite rounds, each will have its own purpose. So if you try to come from the angle that this silly test is not telling that you are a good engineer, yeah, you are right, so? It is just one part in a big system, please, be an engineer, not a complainer! Thank you.

I don't see anything wrong with the coding test approach. It sets a minimum bar for prospective employees. Especially when they also take a look at your syntax and code after you pass the test to determine if you're worthy of the second round (the way you write code reveals a lot about your abilities as a programmer).

It's nice and courageous and all to send this to the HR contact, but if I were HR (I'm not), I wouldn't care that much. When all is said and done, if I'm a representative of a prestigious company, I probably have 10,000 other applicants for the position who are at least as qualified as you are, and who have managed to pass the test with flying colors.

Key assumption here is "HR of a prestigious company" assumption. Really wouldn't give a flying f*** in that case.

I have been programming since 1980, and have a PhD in computer science, a long resume working at some very fine institutions.
Capital One just wanted to administer this test to me.
Can you imaging going to a surgeon and asking them if they knew the heart was on the left?
Asking your plumber if they knew what a wrench was?
How can you be expected to be treated as a professional if you respond to such insulting questions?
Just walk away from places that have no clue and administer this test.

As a programmer working with the greatest teammates, I believe only very few of them, if any at all, can answer moderate level of algorithm tests on Hackerrank website. But I would work with them anytime or hire them in a heartbeat if I were an employer.

They have been dealing with higher level problems on daily basis rather than writing code to find out how many palindromes with maximum 4-letter vowels are there from a given string. The problems for them usually involve figuring out how to finish a task that comes with unrealistic time frame, implementing a ground breaking feature that can fit in with the legacy code in backward-compatibility manner, to find a bug in time-attack fashion from the production code written by someone else who already left the company, to convince the product owner that his "beautiful UI" can be improved, to communicate with other teams located across the globe, juggling between Java, C#, JavaScript, and Kotlin codes from multiple projects/micro services and confused with the syntax and data types, trying to be patient with scrum processes, meetings, and corporate processes, being lost in thousands of JIRA tasks and confluence pages, etc...

The simplistic idea of a good programmer being able to come up with a good algorithm in few minutes without looking up any reference doesn't fit with the current enterprise software industry. Most of the enterprise application programmers have never had to write their own sorting algorithm after they have left the school. If they had to take these tests, they have to invest not just 1 or 2 hours to take the test, but there also is a amount of time needed to refresh their memory about what they learned many years ago. Besides, not all of them are singles, they have families, and their own commitments. Time is a extremely valuable commodity.

Having said that, these tests are useful if the employer is looking for someone with excellent algorithms skills and the job requires writing brilliant ones, or the employer is looking for perfect or near-perfect programmers who are good with both algorithm and real life problems.

In any case, It would be great to have hiring manager or an senior employee from the hiring team taken the test to see if it really fits the position they are hiring for, instead of letting HR make a decision whether to use those tests. For me personally, I would prefer to talk to someone about solving real world problems with enough technical questions- those not from textbook - sprinkled on.

Programming tests are not the perfect approach, just best effort which is good to set a minimum bar and that bar needs to be set by your average team member... Give the same test internally in your company and then expect the new candidate to be slightly better than average results so that your team improves over time. Don't hire a p***y or it will make your skilled people quit at the speed of light. Skilled engineers like to be around skilled engineers, if they perceive the environment to be "low standard", they will quit.... This is not to make HR life easier, but to raise the standard of your team, you get 100 candidates which are better than the average you've got already, then you screen all of them. HR laziness through filtering will not help to find the gems. If you want to find the best gems, you will need to dig a lot of dirt, one way or another, you must put a lot of work. Make your own tests, don't rely on external sources, candidates can easily prepare on those. It has to be a problem made by the best team member which will be the only one not trialing the test, and it must be unique. Then expect above average results given the other team members results.

I could not agree more

Hackerrank has med it worse, because its no longer pseudocode, it has to run. So now it's not 45 minutes of sketching out a solution, its 45 minutes of sketching it out and getting it to run.

The last good interview I had, they gave me a programming task, not a huge one, but a small task. I wrote and deployed it in the cloud so I didn't have to send along build instructions.

I have read this thread and see all the comments in here (until now) and I agree with @scottralph,
And in my opinion : to get/hire a best programmer can not determined from hackerranktest, that is just showing how weak the HR to look and find best candidates to fill the programmer position in that company. Many ways can be done to filter best candidates to fill that position and they (HR) only use the easiest way to get the best result